Its roots look like an elephant that is drowning in quicksand.
My brothers have no idea what they want to be when they grow up. Sparrow says that he wants to be an opera singer. I don’t think it’s because he likes to sing, but because he wants to get fat. Robin got a detention for writing an essay about how he wanted to be a pimp when he grew up. It made everyone in the class laugh though, so he didn’t care.
I want to be a scientist. But instead of telling anyone, I decide that I will have to prove it.
Walking home, I find an old bulletin board in the trash and I get an idea. I go out at night so that I can collect a jar full of moths. I stand under a lamp that is lighting up the back exit of the Chinese restaurant and I jump about capturing the flittering creatures.
How amazing. They think that they are somewhere way, way up in outer space. They think that they have flown all the way up to the moon, but really they haven’t gone anywhere at all.
Two policemen drive up next to me in their car and one of them tells me that I shouldn’t be outside. He says that it’s too dangerous for girls to go out at night.
I have enough moths anyways, so I take their advice and hurry home. All the rapists are two inches behind me. They are going to catch up with me any second and they will rape me and then I will have to go home and tell my parents that I have been raped.
I tried to imagine what it would feel like to be in the jar, trapped and banging on the glass, trying to be let out, like the moths. I remember when Tinker Bell was trapped in a jar in the movie. I had really felt for her. I really had! Nonetheless, I put the jar in the back of the freezer, behind the bag of perogies that has been there for seven years.
And in the morning I pull out the jar and all the moths are dead and still beautiful. I stick the jar under my nightgown and run back to my room. I pin them all to the bulletin board one by one. One of the moths has round spots on its wing that look like cigarette burns. When I am finished I step back and look.
I wonder if I could take it to school and show the science teacher. I had a fantasy of the science teacher looking at my bulletin board and being amazed. “Aren’t you clever, Turtledove? Aren’t you my most brilliant student?”
I say it under my breath so I can hear what it sounds like to hear a compliment like that. I pretend that I am presenting my bulletin board at a conference for butterfly experts all over the world. I imagine myself travelling to Brazil to catch a rare butterfly and name it after myself.
I also think that my moths look so much like my dad’s bow ties in his drawer. I decide to wait no longer and unveil my project to my family. I can’t wait for them to be struck by wonder and amazement.
My mother screams when I show her the board. My whole family runs in to see what the commotion is and they start yelling about it too.
My dad says that if the landlord were to make an inspection of the living quarters and saw all those bugs, then we’d get evicted right on the spot.
My brothers say that no man in their right mind would go out with me when they learned that I like to touch bugs.
My mother throws my whole lovely bulletin board in the garbage. I will never become world famous for my moth collection. For a second, I hate all of them. For a second, I do not want to be a part of this stupid family at all. I feel as though they are going to ruin my whole life. I don’t care if we get evicted. I so want to throw all my clothes into a pillowcase and get the hell out of here.
“At least I only had one girl,” my dad says, and they laugh and laugh and laugh.
I wonder whether every little girl feels as though she is the only little girl on the planet.
But then by dinner, I feel bad that I had wanted to leave everybody. Sometimes I think that it is my job to worry about the family. If I stop believing in them, they will cease to exist, like a bunch of fairies. I am always worried about their feelings, but I am not sure whether or not they are worried about mine.
Since it is Tuesday night we take our Tuesday night stroll. We all push our dad down to the riverbank in his wheelchair. You can see the amusement park on the other side of the river. I can see the coloured lights across the water. It is like there is a galaxy all the way over there. What are things like in that galaxy? I wonder. Are the laws of physics different? Is nighttime daytime and is daytime nighttime? Can you breathe underwater? Are paupers kings and are kings paupers? I want to go all the way over there.
There is no way that we can afford to go to the amusement park. But on the sides of Coca-Cola cans there are one-dollar-off coupons for the park. If I get enough of these together, we can go to the amusement park on the other side of the world. My brothers aren’t allowed to drink Coca-Cola because of their ADD. And both my parents have Type 2 diabetes on account of being so fat, so they aren’t supposed to have Coca-Cola. So I have to find the cans lying around the city.
I am happy to have a new project. I will always need a project in life, that is who I am. I go to all the festivals that month because that is where the most cans are at. There is a festival for wiener dogs. There is an Orchestra in the Park festival. I get into a fight with a junkie wearing nothing but jean shorts and beige sneakers when we both go after the same can under a bench. I go through every garbage can trying to see if there are cans inside of it.
I collect 170 cans. I shake the bag and the bag makes the sound of a marching band with skinny, handsome musicians playing my favourite instruments. All my family is amazed and my dad promises that we will go to the amusement park that weekend.
That night as I am trying to sleep, the boiler starts making more noise than usual.
But the next day, the celebrations are over because we get a letter in the mail saying that we have to go to court because the owner of the building wants to evict us.
We sit around the kitchen table, sick to our stomachs. Now it is for real and we can’t even eat our Cheerios. My mother says that this is going to make her hair fall out. We want her to hang on to the little hair that she has because we surely don’t want a bald mother on top of everything. Our dad says that he doesn’t know what we will do if we get kicked out. We can’t afford to live anywhere else. We will be homeless.
We will have to live inside of grocery carts forever and not just for a joyride down the grocery aisle.
My dad spends the day in bed because he is depressed. We don’t talk about the amusement park even though I have all those cans under my bed and they are trembling with excitement.
My dad says that we should all go to court again, so that we can elicit sympathy from the judge. He tells us to put on our fancy clothes.
He is wearing a tweed jacket and some grey pants. He wears a brown V-neck with little diamonds on it. He has a white shirt underneath. The collar coming out of it is kind of yellow. It is the colour that white things turn when they can’t handle being white anymore. He puts on one of the bow ties, but I don’t think that it helps him. He just doesn’t look employed. It’s one of the strange facts of life that you have to have a job to look like you have a job. Nobody knows why.
My mother is wearing a dress that makes her look all bulgy, like a melting candle. Her tiny heels look like they will break every time she steps. Her makeup is all half a centimetre higher than where it should go.
I am wearing a pair of burgundy tights that have really big holes in the toes, but you can’t see these when I wear my loafers. I wear a grey wool dress and it feels like there are two thousand ants going up and down my arms. My brothers have to wear what they ordinarily wear, because they have nothing fancy.